Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

‘Why?’ she said again. ‘Why are you so obsessed with that idea?’ She turned her back on me to wring out a cloth aggressively under the tap. ‘You’re messed up in the head, you are.’

‘It’s like Carl said. It was me, wasn’t it? I told him people went skating on the ice,’ I said. ‘I told him it was a laugh. I said we did it all the time.’

‘We’ve never been skating on that ice,’ Chloe said. Her lips were flaking and cracked, and she licked them nervously. Where was her gloss?

‘I know,’ I said irritably. It was hard, trying to argue with her in a low voice, while Amanda was ironing in front of the television just through the archway. ‘I was just…’ What was I supposed to tell her? Making things up to impress a Mong? ‘… making conversation.’

‘So?’ Chloe shrugged.

‘So what if he did? What if he went through?’

‘It’d be his own stupid fault,’ Chloe said, decisively. ‘Just because you mentioned it doesn’t mean you forced him to do it.’

‘You’ve changed your tune.’

She was certain. I stared at her. Her eyelid twitched slightly and she took her hair from behind her ear and started to twirl it around her fingers. It found its way into her mouth, and she sucked it into a spike. She was so certain it made me doubt myself.

‘We’re not going to see anything you haven’t already seen,’ Chloe said. ‘You should just forget about it.’

‘I want to go and see.’

‘He’s not there.’ Her hands twitched towards a tea-towel on the draining board. ‘Can’t you just trust me?’ Chloe stared at me. I just shook my head and pulled the tea-towel away from her.

‘You should just trust me ,’ I said.

‘You’ll just have to wait until the spring, won’t you? See what pops up when it thaws out.’

‘I want you and Carl to come, just to double-check. We’ll be there and back in an hour if he drives us.’

‘He’s not going to want to do that,’ Chloe said evenly. ‘He’s busy trying to get this darkroom finished.’ She pulled the teatowel gently through my fingers, spat out her hair and bent her head to scrub at the worktop.

‘It’s Valentine’s Day soon. Tell him he has to take you out, has to drive you wherever you want before you’ll shag him. Tell him you deserve a treat, and that’s the only thing you want. You can talk to him,’ I said.

I spoke more loudly than I needed to, and Amanda popped her head through the arch and smiled at us. She saw Chloe wiping the counter.

‘Good girls,’ she said, ‘but don’t waste your Saturday afternoon cleaning up in here, will you?’

Chloe ignored her and she looked hurt and went back into the living room. I wanted to tell Amanda how it worked. To ignore back. To pretend Chloe didn’t exist. She’d grow up and pack it in soon enough if we all did that. If we all did it, if everyone in the world pretended like Chloe did not exist, she’d probably die.

Amanda was watching Countdown and every now and again she would laugh at the programme, and the steam would come hissing out of the iron.

‘I wish you’d shut up about it,’ Chloe said, ‘you don’t know what you’re playing at.’

‘You’ll ask him though, won’t you?’ I said, and she ducked her head, and then nodded slowly.

‘I’ll ask him. I’ll get him to take us. But don’t talk to anyone else about it. There’s nothing in it. We’re only going to make you feel better.’

‘Tell him you’re humouring me, because I’m bereaved,’ I said, and Chloe looked at me, almost shocked, but saw me smiling and laughed.

‘Right,’ she said, ‘I’ll do that. You look like shit. I am humouring you because you’re bereaved.’

‘I want to go home now. So you’ll ask your dad to give me a lift back?’

Chloe dropped the tea-towel into the sink and wiped her hands on the front of her jeans.

‘I’ll come in the car with you,’ she said, and her eyelid started to twitch again.

It is still dark and the cameras remain with Terry. He’s standing away from the bank of the pond where the forensic tent is a pale oblong behind the shadows of the trees.

The crowd is growing as quickly and silently as dividing bacteria. They push against the yellow tape the police have strung between the trees. They are stamping their feet and puffing hot air into cupped hands. They move together, one man’s mouth at another’s ear. I stare until my eyes feel gritty. These are the hard-core fans: thirty or forty people in anoraks with their hoods up, or duffel coats, or sports jackets with bright, reflective panels. These are the people who follow Terry when he is off-duty, who think they are his friends, who appear like ghosts over and over again in the background of his on-location shots. Some of these people will be his ex-vigilantes from the late nineties and their faces are all the same: solemn, with wide, hungry eyes that track Terry as he moves up and down the tape cordon that separates him from them. He shakes hands over it like the Queen and he nods when they speak, but we at home can’t hear anything because they’re doing the voiceover bit again.

‘It was supposed to be a private ceremony. Close family only, plus media partners and business sponsors. We weren’t even invited.’

Emma’s outraged voice in the dim quiet of my sitting room shocks me. I look at her, but she’s frowning at the television.

‘I think it’s gone past that now,’ I say.

My glass is empty and I wedge it between my thighs, testing the pressure – not sure if I want it to shatter or not.

‘Something’s happened,’ she says. ‘Look, they’re moving.’

The wood was such a dark, quiet place the last time I was there. No one but me, Carl and Chloe wandering along the path and laughing at how often we tripped. Now it’s an outdoor studio, and the black bowl of the sky is stained with the spotlights from the camera crew.

A mortuary van rolls along the footpath, its wide tyres crushing the shrubs and scattering the undergrowth in a soft hail of snapped twigs and torn leaves. The engine thrums gently and there’s a shuffling, a ripple across the crowd of people waiting as they sigh and reorder themselves. Terry is out of shot, and the van can’t get near enough to the tent where the exhumed body is because of the trees. So it stops and two men in navy boiler suits jump out.

The pair move slowly round to the back of the van, open the double doors and bring out a plastic stretcher without a blanket. There’s a gasp, as if no one knew that they’d come to collect the body. There’s some pointing and head-shaking and the police officers move the tape and divide the onlookers to let them through. They don’t unfold the stretcher, but carry it under their arms like a ladder and move along the path cleared through the crowd and marked out by the yellow tape. Heads bowed, and towards the white tent. No rush.

‘It’s weird, isn’t it? It doesn’t feel real.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Who’s to say that they aren’t actors? Don’t you think it’s all just too perfect? It looks like an episode of Silent Witness .’

‘What would you expect it to look like?’ she says vaguely, and refuses to bring her eyes away from the screen. She chews on the cuff off her coat absently. It’s an old habit, that.

‘Do you remember when we did our interviews?’ I say. ‘They filmed us, didn’t they?’

Emma screws up her nose. ‘Not for the telly though.’

‘No, but it’s creepy to think of it, isn’t it? What we said still being on record somewhere. Some tape in an archive. Don’t you ever wonder what they’re going to do with it?’

She finally looks at me. ‘I never think about it.’